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Re: The Best of Luck to you!

You're absolutely right. The bean counters have taken over and they are much more concerned about protecting their investment than letting it walk out the door for sharing with the people who would like to hear it in all it's glory.

But, there is hope for getting original masters. Winston Ma is releasing 16 mid 60's Decca classical albums on XRCD over the next year. The owners actually sent the original analog masters to Paul for three of the first four he has done. The master of the fourth was too far gone so they sent a safety copy. How much of a misconception it is to believe that any and all analog masters are true perfection really proved itself in this case. Paul found that the original Decca master tapes had really light bass, and he really struggled to get a balanced presentation from them. Ironically, we chatted with a guy who had owned what he was told were 4th or 5th gen transfers from those masters, and he said that his dubs had "way more bass". OK, so Paul had the originals, this guy had an unknown generation copy with it's attendant degradation of the top end and possibly a re-EQ. You can guess who I think had access to how the original really sounded, and I know from our shared taste that I would not have liked it if it was left as lean as Paul said it was. So the notion that putting out a recording exactly like the tape master sounds rather than how it was EQ'd, for example, as the lacquer was cut, may be the wrong way to go about getting the most satisfying and musical sound from it.

Tam Henderson has expressed a willingness to license some of Keith's earlier analog recordings for Reference Recordings to us, and if that happens we would certainly get the original masters in that case, with Paul doing a minumum of processing. And of course with a Bill Putnam-built recording studio down the hall from the mastering room, we hope to do some of our own recordings too. Paul has been working with a group I'm not quite ready to name, on a demo which he recorded on his 827 at Coast Recorders. Depending on what kind of deals we can work, the stature of the recording we're interested in, and where the tapes are located, it might even be worthwhile to send Paul to another label's vault to make a transfer.

I'm sure we'll learn a heluva lot about the condition of archived tapes in the process, and I'm sure we will only work from the best possible original we can get.

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